English
Essence Über Alles
By Dian Hanson. Excerpt from the book 'History of Men's Magazines, Vol. I'
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"Sensational love stories, and even such warmly colored pictures as are presented in the Arabian Nights ... had better be tabooed ... All exciting literature must be renounced. Marriage need not be recommended to the confirmed masturbator in the hope of curing him of his vice. For natural intercourse he has little power or no desire; the indulgence of a depraved appetite has destroyed the natural appetite. And has a being so degraded any right to curse a child with the inheritance of such a wretched descent? Far better that the vice and its consequences die with him." The Transmission of Life by George H. Napheys, M.D., J.G. Fergus & Co, 1872.
Sex publishing has always been a battleground. On the one hand there were men, mentally and physically hardwired to respond to erotic images. On the other hand, other men, determined to deprive the first group of what they naturally desired. These first two volumes tracing the history of men's magazines are about the struggle between lust and taboo, beginning with the first bare French breasts in 1880 and ending with bare American breasts in 1958. It's amazing that it took 60 years to get photographs of topless women accepted on America's newsstands and on newsstands in most of the rest of the world, and that every step leading up to this small victory represented hundreds of obscenity arrests, years of collective court and prison time, and millions of dollars and Deutschmarks and Kronen and Pesos, all spent in the futile attempt to keep men's eyes off the female body. When Dr. Napheys was writing about the effects of stimulating literature back in 1872 it was with the belief that men were born with all the "male essence" they would ever possess. Male essence wasn't just for procreation back then; a man who squandered his seed in self-abuse would soon waste his whole reserve, and with it would go his physical strength, his intellectual powers, his moral fortitude and his mind, in roughly that order. Dr. Napheys was one of the gentler doomsayers in his recommended treatment for this evil - he thought most men could be cured by simple blistering of the offending parts and that castration, recommended by many of his fellow physicians, was seldom necessary.
Most of the Victorian frenzy over sexy literature came from the degeneracy theories of Dr. Simon Tissot, a Swiss physician who studied the feminizing effects of castration on men in the mid-1700s and decided - incorrectly - that loss of semen was to blame. Compounding his error, he theorized that excessive masturbation would have the same effect on a man with a full testicular complement. This makes it particularly strange that castration became a treatment for intractable masturbation, but by then moralists all over Northern Europe and the US had lost sight of the point and were just bent on stamping out pleasure. In this crusade the camera and printing press were increasingly viewed as handmaids of Satan.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
"Sensational love stories, and even such warmly colored pictures as are presented in the Arabian Nights ... had better be tabooed ... All exciting literature must be renounced. Marriage need not be recommended to the confirmed masturbator in the hope of curing him of his vice. For natural intercourse he has little power or no desire; the indulgence of a depraved appetite has destroyed the natural appetite. And has a being so degraded any right to curse a child with the inheritance of such a wretched descent? Far better that the vice and its consequences die with him." The Transmission of Life by George H. Napheys, M.D., J.G. Fergus & Co, 1872.
Sex publishing has always been a battleground. On the one hand there were men, mentally and physically hardwired to respond to erotic images. On the other hand, other men, determined to deprive the first group of what they naturally desired. These first two volumes tracing the history of men's magazines are about the struggle between lust and taboo, beginning with the first bare French breasts in 1880 and ending with bare American breasts in 1958. It's amazing that it took 60 years to get photographs of topless women accepted on America's newsstands and on newsstands in most of the rest of the world, and that every step leading up to this small victory represented hundreds of obscenity arrests, years of collective court and prison time, and millions of dollars and Deutschmarks and Kronen and Pesos, all spent in the futile attempt to keep men's eyes off the female body. When Dr. Napheys was writing about the effects of stimulating literature back in 1872 it was with the belief that men were born with all the "male essence" they would ever possess. Male essence wasn't just for procreation back then; a man who squandered his seed in self-abuse would soon waste his whole reserve, and with it would go his physical strength, his intellectual powers, his moral fortitude and his mind, in roughly that order. Dr. Napheys was one of the gentler doomsayers in his recommended treatment for this evil - he thought most men could be cured by simple blistering of the offending parts and that castration, recommended by many of his fellow physicians, was seldom necessary.
Most of the Victorian frenzy over sexy literature came from the degeneracy theories of Dr. Simon Tissot, a Swiss physician who studied the feminizing effects of castration on men in the mid-1700s and decided - incorrectly - that loss of semen was to blame. Compounding his error, he theorized that excessive masturbation would have the same effect on a man with a full testicular complement. This makes it particularly strange that castration became a treatment for intractable masturbation, but by then moralists all over Northern Europe and the US had lost sight of the point and were just bent on stamping out pleasure. In this crusade the camera and printing press were increasingly viewed as handmaids of Satan.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
History of Men's Magazines Vol. 1
Hardcover 8.4 x 10.9 in., 460 pages
Special Price: $ 29.99
Save $ 30.00!
Special Price: $ 29.99
Save $ 30.00!
The definitive annotated and illustrated history of girlie periodicals (1900-World War II)
Paris Tabou, France, 1950s